Once your shop is set up for holiday sales, you’re well on your way to being optimized for selling into the new year. These last few tips are going to help you set up a longer term strategy for maintaining a good shop.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know if all the things you were doing to improve your shop were actually working? Data to the rescue! While scary at first (to me at least!) data really can be your friend by letting you:

1. Keep track of sales

2. See where traffic is coming from

3. Use it to your advantage

1. Keep track of Sales

As a Shapeways shop owner, you have a great tool at your disposal: The Sales Overview Download located on your My Shop page. The Sales Overview Download (XLS) allows you to see exactly what models you’re selling in which material, when they have shipped, and which country they were shipped to. With this data you will be able to create your own shop analytics which can help you improve the performance of your shop. This great blog post dives into the details.

How is this helpful? If you see that you make most of your sales in silver, you can tailor your designs to sell even more. If you see most of your sales coming from Japan, you could think about what items might appeal to that specific market. You don’t know what you don’t know until you experiment and measure!

2. See where traffic is coming from

Ever wanted to know exactly how many hits you get in your shop on any given day? Where they come from? What keywords they used to find you? How long they stayed on your page?

Google Analytics can tell you all those things! Check out this handy tutorial for setting up Google Analytics in your shop. It’s as easy as pasting a quick code and unleashes a lot of data you can use to improve your marketing efforts.

3. Use it to your advantage!

Using the data, you discover how to tailor your shop to your customers. For example, if you see a lot of traffic coming from Twitter, (like we do!) you might consider tweeting more often about your products. If you tag @shapeways with it, we’ll often re-tweet it or favorite it, exposing your product to all of Shapeways followers (10,000 and counting!). Read more about it in this handy Shapeways guide to Twitter.

Alternatively, you might find that a lot of the traffic to your page is coming from search, in which case you would want to consider AdWords or optimizing your descriptions for search even further.

So dive into data, you might be surprised by what you find. Next week we’ll take a look at advertising, and using those AdWords that Google may send your way just for signing up for Analytics!